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Culture in management is an important issue, and one that is still open, from both theoretical and practical points of view. Its essence lies in its significance to the functioning of an organisation as a whole. Culture is a universal medium, in which people act and organisations are submerged. It is a basis for all processes, such as communication, the exercise of power and valuation in the world of people and organisations. Culture, however, also remains an open and ambiguous phenomenon.

I began my research into cultural issues in management 20 years ago. Back then I assumed a functionalist approach, as I believed it to be the most mature stream of research, allowing for operationalisation of the notion of organisational culture. However, it turned out that an alternative approach to functionalism was developing more dynamically, and even completely new cognitive perspectives then appeared. Most of all, a number of concepts which make use of interpretative assumptions were created, which understand culture as a network of interactions and meanings. But the most rapid increase in the number of publications and research took place within the critical current, which as a scientific school is only two decades old. By contrast, postmodernism has by now lost its significance, although in the 1980s and 1990s it seemed to be the most important alternative to functionalism. Such rapid and profound changes in cognitive approaches to research into culture provoke reflection, and force one to adopt an open cognitive approach. This is why this monograph deals with different visions of culture in management, emphasising epistemological and methodological pluralism, and the need for the development of new, creative concepts of culture.

My interests in the epistemology and methodology of management science lead towards such non-orthodox areas of the theory of organisation as cultural processes. The research I carried out for the monograph entitled Epistemology of Management made me realise that reflection on the cultural processes of an organisation develops quickly and is source of a number of new approaches within the social sciences. Thus, making use of numerous threads and interpretations which appear as part of epistemological management projects, I decided to focus on the issue of cultural processes in management, and this monograph is the outcome.

This monograph contains an explication of several theses which place cultural analyses in management science on a very general plain of academic discourse.

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1. The theory of culture in management science is a reflection of the theory of culture in science as such. This is why all deliberations on organisational culture and intercultural comparative studies of organisations should be carried out in the context of the development of cultural discourse in social and humanist sciences.

2. The basis for the reflection on culture is a proposal for a division into paradigms, which means largely diverse ways of understanding culture that are rooted in science and have epistemological, methodological and pragmatic consequences.

3. The subject of research should be the dynamics of organisational culture, which means culture from the procedural perspective, undergoing constant transformation. This includes the issue of spontaneous transformation of culture and the processes of planned and controlled changes.

The problem of a research field determined in this way is its excess. Cultural processes in organisations include numerous social phenomena that are difficult to define and study. Organisational culture is an ambiguous notion, described within different paradigms. This is why the stand taken here is based on epistemological pluralism, meaning openness to research into cultural processes in organisations from many perspectives. Pluralism in cultural research has a long tradition, as it relates to consideration of the assumptions of cultural relativism and the limiting of ethnocentrism, as well as the tension between functionalist and interpretative approaches present in cultural research from the very beginning.

It also seems that it is worth looking for completely new inspiration in the research into organisational culture, as the most popular concepts are by now exhausting their cognitive and pragmatic potential. In my opinion, further exploitation of the already classic models of E. Schein and G. Hofstede contributes little to management, and so it is worth looking at new concepts of culture, many of which are offered by social and humanist sciences. This is why special emphasis has been placed on looking for new inspirations in poorly spread, yet valuable perspectives, such as the neoevolutionary understanding of organisational culture and a critical approach to cultural processes in management. First of all, this is especially important from epistemological, methodological and pragmatic points of view, and concerns mostly the better understanding of culture in management. Secondly, it is important to carry out a reliable analysis of the cognitive effectiveness of different methods of research into organisational culture and culture in management. Thirdly, it is worth drawing on the practical effectiveness of culture management, as we are dealing with growing scepticism about the ←10 | 11→possibility of managing culture at all. This is why it seems of key significance for researchers into management culture to think about the existing concepts and methods, but also to be open to new inspirations.

The pragmatic orientation of management science also encourages attempts to carry out analyses from the point of view of organisational culture’s usefulness in the process of introducing changes. The prescriptive aspirations of our discipline are supposed to lead to the improvement of an organisation. In this sense, organisational culture is a tool for the introduction of positive changes. It seems, however, that many researchers, especially interpretativists and supporters of the critical current, do not agree with viewing organisational culture as a tool of optimisation changes. In consequence, we are faced with a research problem that will be analysed further in this monograph – the basic question about the relationships between the cultural processes of an organisation and change management.

This current monograph consists of seven chapters, and assumes a beginning from reflections on the most significant cognitive problems of cultural currents, through an analysis of well-known and popular functionalist concepts of culture in management, ending with a presentation of less popular perspectives.

The first chapter focuses on an analysis of the basic problems of the development of cultural reflection in management science. The starting point is the historical overview of the evolution of cultural discourse in our discipline, with reference to the idea of culture in social and humanist sciences. Then, there is a proposal for a pattern of the diversification of culture concepts in management, consisting in distinguishing four paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, critical current and postmodernism. Based on this, the following chapters analyse diverse concepts of cultural current in management. The subjects of the next subchapter are the different ways of defining organisational culture, resulting from the proposals of paradigms in management. The chapter ends with an analysis of cognitive problems faced by the cultural discourse in management. The following chapters of this work attempt to solve these dilemmas.

The second chapter focuses on the oldest paradigm of understanding culture, which is functionalism, called the neopositivist-functionalist-systemic paradigm. This current is related to the creation and rapid development of the issues of cultural research in management, and offers numerous theoretical, methodological and empirical works. The chapter starts with a description of a functionalist vision of organisational culture, and after that focuses on the essence of the functionalist understanding of organisational culture. It then discusses the diverse models, typologies and functions of organisational culture which are ←11 | 12→widespread in management. The chapter ends with an attempt to look critically at the paradigm, both from the point of view of different cognitive perspectives and the pragmatic usefulness of these theories. It is a rather extensive chapter, even though it only briefly discusses a number of functionalist concepts of organisational culture. Apart from the first and last subchapters, it is of a reconstructive character, and so it is an attempt to select and briefly discuss a number of functionalist concepts of culture that are rooted in the theory and practice of management.

The third chapter analyses the significance of the second perspective, also originating from the functionalist paradigm, which is the influence of a cultural context on management processes. The most important projects described here include intercultural comparative studies based on the models of cultural dimensions, conducted by, among others, G. Hofstede, A. Trompenaars and C. Hampden-Turner, R. Hous and R. Inglehart. After a brief presentation of the models and cultural dimensions assumed by these researchers, the concept of cultural circles is discussed, which is a result of the intercultural comparative studies conducted. The next subchapter analyses the most important – from the perspective of management – research issues, undertaken by researchers carrying out intercultural comparative projects, and which are cultural determinants of the competitiveness of companies and whole economies. After that, a presentation is made, using the example of Polish culture, of how ambiguous the results and interpretations of the results of intercultural comparative studies can be. The last two subchapters concern two fundamental processes which take place in modern culture. The first is cultural convergence, which occurs with the deepening of globalisation processes. The second is the development of modern consumer culture, which is becoming the dominant model of values of modern societies.

The fourth chapter focuses on the issues of culture and organisational culture described from a point of view which is completely new to social sciences: the neoevolutionary perspective. It shares some elements with the neopositivist and functionalist paradigm, but to a great extent it is a separate cognitive strand. Should neoevolutionism turn out to be a promising basis for epistemological and methodological analyses in social sciences in the future, it will probably crystallise into a fully separate paradigm. The beginning of the chapter discusses the issues of neoevolutionism from the perspective of management science, and then makes an attempt to formulate an overview of the neoevolutionary concept of culture. The following subchapter introduces a theoretical proposal for considering culture within a projected and a rather promising general theory of replication (memetics). Then, there is an attempt to apply neoevolutionism to ←12 | 13→the analysis of organisational culture, through an analogy with primitive hunter-gatherer communities.

The subject of the fifth chapter is an analysis of cultural processes in management from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. This is the paradigm that has gathered the greatest number of works in the world over the last thirty years among non-functionalist approaches and within the cultural discourse in management science. The chapter starts with a description of the symbolic-interpretative paradigm, oriented towards the presentation of an outline of different interactionist concepts in management. Then, there is an analysis of extensive applications of symbolic interactionism with regard to cultural research into management. The last issue discussed in this chapter is the concept of organisational identity, which is set within the interpretative paradigm and is a proposal for a new perspective on cultural issues in management.

The sixth chapter contains an analysis of culture from the perspective of a radical structuralism paradigm, which in our discipline took the institutional form of Critical Management Studies. The analysis starts with theoretical deliberations on the basic cognitive and methodological assumptions which underlie the critical current, and which lead to radical criticism of the previous, mostly functionalist, concepts of organisational culture and culture in management. Another issue is the deriving of the emancipation concept of organisational culture from criticism, which is based on the negation of the dominant paradigm. The position taken by the critical current is controversial, and so the subject of the last subchapter is a distanced view on Critical Management Studies and the interpretation of culture that they propose.

The last chapter focuses on a dynamic perspective on organisational culture, analysing the relationships between culture and changes in management. Here, organisational changes are understood both as spontaneous transformations of an organisation and planned changes, which, by definition, should be controlled. At the beginning of the chapter, an attempt was made to organise the relationships between culture and organisational changes with the use of the paradigm matrix of social sciences used throughout the work. After that, based on this pattern, functionalist, interpretative and emancipation concepts and methods of managing cultural changes were analysed. The last subchapter is a proposal for the application of a metaphorical approach to the analysis of organisational culture dynamics.

The summary of the work emphasises the need for a multi-paradigm perspective on organisational culture and the prospects for the development of reflection on culture in the social sciences. The postmodernist approach and its cognitive relativism occupy only a marginal position in my analyses of culture ←13 | 14→in management. I believe that practising science with extreme assumptions of epistemological relativism is actually impossible, and so despite its output in the cultural discourse, postmodernism should not be treated as a paradigm or a scientific approach sensu stricto, but as a source of inspiration, ideas and metaphors. I think that at least the radical version of postmodernism belongs to art, literature and essay writing, rather than science. It seems, too, that postmodern inspirations have been successfully used by representatives of other non-fundamentalist paradigms.

I hope that the concepts presented in this book will contribute to the broadening of our knowledge of cultural processes in organisations, and particularly that it will be used for the better understanding and further exploration of concepts, such as interpretative and critical perspectives on culture (e.g. sensemaking) and the neoevolutionary approach. Finally, the proposed matrix of culture paradigms, drawn from G. Burrell and G. Morgan, is supposed to serve as a reference, but, of course, does not reflect the full complexity of reality. The book is based on Polish publications of Lukasz Sulkowski.^*

* L. Sulkowski, Kulturowe procesy zarządzania, Difin, Warszawa 2012. L. Sulkowski, Czy warto zajmować się kulturą organizacyjną, Zarządzanie Zasobami Ludzkimi, 2008, 6, 9–25. L. Sulkowski, Społeczeństwo informacyjne a kultura konsumpcyjna, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2006, 221–227. L. Sulkowski, Czy kultury organizacyjne zmierzają do unifikacji? Zarządzanie zasobami ludzkimi, 2002, (3-4), 9–20. L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna-próba oceny znaczenia nurtu kulturowego w zarządzaniu, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2002, 157–161. L. Sulkowski, Czy jest możliwe kształtowanie kultury organizacyjnej? Organizacja i Kierowanie, 2001, (4), 99–110. L. Sulkowski, Organizacja w poszukiwaniu tożsamości, Przegląd Organizacji, 2005, (3), 7–10. L. Sulkowski, Wieloznaczność kultury organizacyjnej, Przedsiębiorczość i Zarządzanie, 2012, 13(12). L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna od podstaw, Wydawnictwo Społecznej Akademii Nauk, Łódź 2020. L. Sulkowski, O związkach między kulturą organizacyjną a organizacją uczącą się, Przegląd Organizacji, 2003, (4), 9–11. L. Sulkowski, Funkcjonalistyczna wizja kultury organizacyjnej w zarządzaniu–dominujący paradygmat i jego krytyka, Problemy Zarządzania, 2013, 20–32.